Our Current Target: 2950Amount Raised So Far: £3194.30*Our target and amount raised incudes NBK who is doing his own personal page. But I'm including this for the glory of GRcade.

MASSIVE EDITOur very own SlayerX has just managed to secure a massive donation of £1800 from his workplace, the Yorkshire Building Society. This means that we have already achieved our target from this one donation alone! I want to personally extend my thanks on behalf of everyone taking part, towards SlayerX and YBS. You sir are an absolute legend! To everyone else taking part I'd like to think that this will spur all of us on with our efforts. We may not get another donation like that one, but every little bit helps to get us even further past that finish line than we already are! Amazing scenes!

This is the first in hopefully many Official GRcade Charity endeavors. It's our hope that through this event we can both collect a decent amount of cash for a good cause (More about that in a second) while simultaneously spreading the name of this glorious forum and raising our profile a bit.

So what exactly are we doing?Well if you've been paying attention you may have noticed several members taking part in something called Sick Kids Save Point. This is a charity event that's been running for the past five years to raise money for the Sick Kids Friends Foundation, which in turn helps supply facilities and equipment (Amongst other things) for the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh.

The Sick Kids Save Point event is very simple. You game for 24 hours, while people sponsor you. That's where we raise our money and have a damn good time while we're at it. What you play and how you play it are entirely up to yourself. This years event is on 9th-11th October, so there's plenty of time to prepare and raise cash!

Our History with Sick Kids Save PointGRcade has historically supported Sick Kids Save Point and over the past few years several members have taken part.Last year SlayerX, Dig Dug and myself raised over £500 between us.Prior to that NBK had taken part in a couple of events, including his infamous "Bad games marathon".Wuijibobo also carried the torch himself for a year.In fact NBK has something of a personal reason for wanting to help so I'll let him tell you about that here.

NBK wrote:Hello all, if you're reading this then you already have my thanks. As Cheeky Devlin has mentioned, I have a very special connection with SKSP: it provides support to the hospital that helps my family and allows me to help it in return by doing something that I love.

My son has recently started attending a specialist language class at a local primary school and, while he's doing brilliantly now, it wasn't always like that. A lot of the improvement seen in him is down to the continued support that we receive from the hospital and the wonderful staff that work there.

This place has been my home for a hell of a long time and I've seen a lot of good come out of it. It'd be great if some of you were up for joining Team GR, taking part and spreading the word of what has to be one of the most awesome fund raising events out there

Play games, help kids. It's as simple as that.

Team! [/consolevania]

So how do we do this?Well this year SKSP are doing things a little bit differently. Instead of everyone fundraising on their own and all the totals being tallied at the end they're implementing a team system. So everyone who takes part is contributing towards one total. This means you can keep track of exactly how much has been raised in total for the whole event. I've set up a GRcade Just Giving page, which is a part of the Sick Kids Save Point team. With this we'll be able to see exactly how much we've raised and how we rank amongst all the other participants. Basically our goal is to be at the top of that list with a nice four (Or five!) figure sum next to our total!Alright I'm in. Now what?Very simply there are three things each participant needs to do.

1 - State in the thread that you are going to take part, along with how much money you think you can raise. I'll update our Target on our JG page to reflect the total.2 - Go out and get your donations! We've got just under six months till the event so there's plenty of time.3 - Between the 9th and 11th of October, play games for 24 hours!

How People Can Donate!

So we currently have three different ways of making donations to the total.1 - Via our Just Giving Page - This lets people donate with their debit/credit cards, in any amount they like.2 - Via TXT message. I've set up our specific code for this. This is probably the easiest way to donate as the money just goes onto the persons bill. They simply text our unique code (GRCA99), followed by an amount (£1, £2, £3, £4, £5 or £10) to 70070. Like this...

3 - Cash - Probably the least preferred method, but one you'll probably get the most from. In this case the best way to handle it is to pay it into your bank account and then make the donation yourself.

It's entirely up to yourself how you go about getting those donations. Pester friends, family and colleagues. Contact your employer and see if they will be able to help out. Some larger companies have Charities Departments that deal entirely with things like this (I got £50 from mine last year). I'd like to see discussions and suggestions about how people can do this in the thread.

So now you can start thinking about what you're going to be doing come the actual event!Will you be playing games with a theme (E.g. Bad games)? Will you be setting yourself a challenge (Play and finish as many as possible)? Will you be live streaming? Will you get some mates involve and do nothing but couch co-op for 24 hours?The possibilities are limited only by your imagination and game collection.

Finally....The success of this lies solely with us. This is an opportunity for GRcade to do something with a potentially massive positive impact on the lives of thousands of Children. Your support could mean the difference between us raising a small amount of money or a life-changing amount of money.

Excellent. I'm in, as it should be my off weekend on Saturday 10th October by my calculations.

Possible themes - Mario platformers, all Resident Evil games. I'll decide nearer the time. I might even be able to get some streaming gear off my brother's friend.

Would set a pretty modest target of £100 for myself as the last time I tried a charity drive for something I strawberry floated my ankle and couldn't run the race. A lot of the people I'd be petitioning probably wouldn't get the idea of a game-athon either.

Corazon de Leon wrote:Excellent. I'm in, as it should be my off weekend on Saturday 10th October by my calculations.

Possible themes - Mario platformers, all Resident Evil games. I'll decide nearer the time. I might even be able to get some streaming gear off my brother's friend.

Would set a pretty modest target of £100 for myself as the last time I tried a charity drive for something I strawberry floated my ankle and couldn't run the race. A lot of the people I'd be petitioning probably wouldn't get the idea of a game-athon either.

Excellent!

First confirmed participant!

For me half the fun was preparing my stream and deciding what I was going to play.

I should also confirm my own participation. Gonna go for a target of £200 this time around.

Corazon de Leon wrote:Excellent. I'm in, as it should be my off weekend on Saturday 10th October by my calculations.

Possible themes - Mario platformers, all Resident Evil games. I'll decide nearer the time. I might even be able to get some streaming gear off my brother's friend.

Would set a pretty modest target of £100 for myself as the last time I tried a charity drive for something I strawberry floated my ankle and couldn't run the race. A lot of the people I'd be petitioning probably wouldn't get the idea of a game-athon either.

Excellent!

First confirmed participant!

For me half the fun was preparing my stream and deciding what I was going to play.

I should also confirm my own participation. Gonna go for a target of £200 this time around.

Yeah, should be a good laugh actually. I'm thinking at the moment that a play through of all the 2D Mario games in the main series(SMB, SMB2, SMB3, SMW, SMW2, NSMBW, NSMBWU, NSLB), to be done with two players and more for the Wii/Wii U versions would be outstanding. There's nothing funnier than messing with people on four player Mario.

If I can't get partners, then the Resident Evil marathon(RE:0, REMake, RE2, RE3, RE:CV, RE4, RE5, RE6, then if there's time Revelations, Revelations 2) is a go-er.

Corazon de Leon wrote:Excellent. I'm in, as it should be my off weekend on Saturday 10th October by my calculations.

Possible themes - Mario platformers, all Resident Evil games. I'll decide nearer the time. I might even be able to get some streaming gear off my brother's friend.

Would set a pretty modest target of £100 for myself as the last time I tried a charity drive for something I strawberry floated my ankle and couldn't run the race. A lot of the people I'd be petitioning probably wouldn't get the idea of a game-athon either.

Excellent!

First confirmed participant!

For me half the fun was preparing my stream and deciding what I was going to play.

I should also confirm my own participation. Gonna go for a target of £200 this time around.

Yeah, should be a good laugh actually. I'm thinking at the moment that a play through of all the 2D Mario games in the main series(SMB, SMB2, SMB3, SMW, SMW2, NSMBW, NSMBWU, NSLB), to be done with two players and more for the Wii/Wii U versions would be outstanding. There's nothing funnier than messing with people on four player Mario.

If I can't get partners, then the Resident Evil marathon(RE:0, REMake, RE2, RE3, RE:CV, RE4, RE5, RE6, then if there's time Revelations, Revelations 2) is a go-er.

In fairness I can have the first three Marios done in a few hours, likewise with RE:Make, 2 and 3 would only be about 5/6 hours.

EDIT: Looks like I've roped in my brother to join me for Resident Evil-destruction. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time, just blast through all of the Resi games. He'll probably take 1/3 and CV, I'll take 0, 2(sub 90 minute time is now the target) and 4 and we'll co-op 5 and 6. Standard rules though, neither of us will be allowed to sleep.

Being able to do it for charity is fantastic. I'm not sure that you're meant to put yourself through awesome-ness to get people's money though. I don't think that's how it's supposed to work.

I can see this getting pretty big - we have £650 pledged already, and many of the people who have previously taken part or who said they are interested won't have even seen this new thread yet. That's fantastic news!

IMO we should have a single Twitch stream that periodically cuts between all the different members doing this throughout the days it is happening, potentially with a cheerful chap "hosting" and commentating too. (We can just rotate who is host so it isn't a burden on anyone.)

It shouldn't be particularly difficult to do this, you just need to put one person in charge of a Twitch channel in "Host mode" and they can restream any of the members' channels they like. From there it just takes a little bit of showsmanship and keeping an eye on all the streams to make sure we're showing the most exciting one at any given time, but of course giving all of them a fair showing too. I know this sounds ambitious but IMO we could have a good chance of picking up some randomers from Twitch/Reddit and they may well donate if we make our text-to-donate link available.

I am happy to do all I can to help and I'd definitely like to take part. As this happens on a weekend I should be able to make sure I'm free. I feel like I could comfortably raise £100 from my friends for a good cause, so add me to the list for that amount!

I can see this getting pretty big - we have £650 pledged already, and many of the people who have previously taken part or who said they are interested won't have even seen this new thread yet. That's fantastic news!

IMO we should have a single Twitch stream that periodically cuts between all the different members doing this throughout the days it is happening, potentially with a cheerful chap "hosting" and commentating too. (We can just rotate who is host so it isn't a burden on anyone.)

It shouldn't be particularly difficult to do this, you just need to put one person in charge of a Twitch channel in "Host mode" and they can restream any of the members' channels they like. From there it just takes a little bit of showsmanship and keeping an eye on all the streams to make sure we're showing the most exciting one at any given time, but of course giving all of them a fair showing too. I know this sounds ambitious but IMO we could have a good chance of picking up some randomers from Twitch/Reddit and they may well donate if we make our text-to-donate link available.

I am happy to do all I can to help and I'd definitely like to take part. As this happens on a weekend I should be able to make sure I'm free. I feel like I could comfortably raise £100 from my friends for a good cause, so add me to the list for that amount!

Awesome post Karl.

A Twitch stream like that would be great. It's definitely something worth looking into as we start to plan out what we're going to be doing for our individual marathons.

There are ten games in the main Resident Evil series, including Revelations, which gives a pretty punishing time-slot of 2.4 hours per game if we're to get it all done. I've decided that New Game+ is the only way that this will work out, so that infinite launchers etc. can be used to speed things up. This is how it should roll:

But some serious practice will be needed to hit the marks on some of those - my best time for Leon A(RE2) is 91 minutes, for example, and I've never managed RE4 in under 4 hours(although I do have a Chicago Typewriter and Infinite Launcher that I didn't have before).

I haven't actually played either of the Revelations games either, so God knows if those are appropriate times.

Managed to tag in another partner provisionally for the co-op in 5 and 6, so that should ease the pressure a bit on those games. Will need to probably punt them on hard instead of very hard.

Is the JustGiving Page a team? I feel a bit odd about asking people to donate to a GRcade page and would be much happier setting my own and linking it to the rest.

Yeah the Just Giving account is a team. One of our goals with this was to help raise the profile of GRcade as well as a load of money, as such we're working as one big GRcade team, with a shared total.

If you would feel better doing it individually though then that's entirely up to yourself. You'd need to set up a JG page then link it to the SKSP6 page (Link in the OP and on our JG page). I think NBK already had his set up and going before we launched this (He's Neil Gow on the SKSP6 team list) so you wouldn't be the only person.